Mozilla Contemplating Five Week Release Cycle

MrSeb writes with an article in Extreme Tech about the ever quickening pace of Firefox development. Quoting the article: "Mozilla, not content with its monumental shift from four major builds in five years down to a new stable build every six weeks, is looking at outputting a new release every five weeks, or perhaps even less. Christian Legnitto, a project manager at Mozilla (and currently the 'release manager' of Firefox), announced the intention to shift to a shorter release cycle on Mozilla's planning mailing list. In response to one developer citing the success of the six-week release cycle, and asking whether it would be feasible to speed it up even further, Legnitto said: 'Yes, I absolutely think in the future we will shorten the cycle.' There are still some pains to overcome, though, such as add-on maintenance, testing, and localization — and ultimately, as browsers become more like operating systems, do we really want something as important as Firefox receiving a new major version every 5 weeks?" In other news, it looks like Firefox is losing users faster than ever despite (because of?) the new rapid release cycle.

Re:Have they totally lost it, or what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Updating documentation isn't as hot or sexy as bumping the version up one full major release, whether it deserves it or not.

I have never seen a single open source project ever that gave two shits about documentation. Not one.

Browser share

[Jamu]

The article linked to describes losing browser share. That does not imply that it's losing users. It might be. However, the article does not say that.

Re:Sigh...

[SiMac]

I've personally switched to Chrome everywhere, and looking at getting the entire office at work switched from Firefox to Chrome as well (the rapid release cycle of Firefox is nuts, its more rapid than even Chrome and the browser only gets worse with each new release anyway.)

The Chrome release cycle is six weeks, the same as the current Firefox release cycle. The release cycles are effectively identical. The only difference is that, with Chrome, updates are mandatory. You can't disable auto-update, and you don't get a warning when it's going to happen. Where do people get this information?

Headline is misleading

[kripkenstein]

Did Mozilla go hire some MBAs or something? That's the only rational explanation for this idiocy.

The userbase has rejected rapid release. They hate it. Users are leaving the browser faster then ever before ever since it started.

So Mozilla's response is... even faster releases?

Hi, I am a Firefox dev. The answer to your question is no: The answer is not faster releases. We are not currently planning to do faster releases, despite the Slashdot headline.

What is the link then? Someone - not sure if a Mozilla developer or not - posted the suggestion to make it faster. Since Firefox's development is open, anyone can post whatever they want whenever they want. There was some debate, most of it negative - as you would expect. Then someone posted it to Slashdot, where it was picked up.

So, no faster releases. What actually is the Mozilla response to the current situation: To fix the problems. We are working to make updates silent and break less addons. We've also made it so third parties can't install addons without your permission. All of this is in response to user feedback. Hopefully some of that stuff will be posted to Slashdot too ;)